For the week of April 28th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Inherent Vice to Blu-ray. Inherent Vice represents the official nexus between filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson and author Thomas Pynchon; while avowed Pynchon fan Anderson has certainly paid homage to Pynchon before (long stretches of The Master unfold like a stealth adaptation of Pynchon's landmark 1963 novel V), this time he's working straight from Pynchon's 2009 novel, a labyrinthine, shaggy-dog noir about pot-addled P.I. Doc Sportello (the great Joaquin Phoenix) and his various investigations/dawdlings in fictional Gordita Beach, CA, circa 1970. The wonderful (and maddening, and exhilarating, and frustrating) thing about the novel is how Pynchon makes Doc's confusion the reader's. As the perpetually stoned Doc wades from one shadowy conspiracy into another, Pynchon keeps tossing strange names and bizarre sex and contradictory details at the reader, creating the impression of tortured synapses trying desperately to fire, and Anderson is able to replicate that sensation with uncanny precision. Even though he's elided the novel's biggest flights of hallucinatory fancy (two extensive drug trips and Doc's terrifying-hilarious trip to Las Vegas), Anderson uses every aspect of cinema itself to disorient us, from Robert Elswit's grainy, boxy cinematography (this film looks like it was shot in 1972), to Jonny Greenwood's sinuous, tonally promiscuous score (and as is his wont, Anderson gooses the score with sharp, unpredictable needle drops from the likes of Can and Minnie Riperton), to the all-star cast (Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Jena Malone, Michael K. Williams, Jeannie Berlin, Martin Donovan, Maya Rudolph, Eric Roberts, and Martin Short), most of whom fade in and out of the film in a procession of disorienting cameo appearances. Doc is the only constant (I'd be amazed if Phoenix weren't in every scene of the film), and he's a shambling mess, half (or all)-distracted by the ethereal, untrustworthy presence of his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston, who is as fearless in her ten-or-so minutes of screentime as Phoenix is the whole movie) and relying on the support of a good-natured mystic (Joanna Newsom) who might be a figment of his own imagination. For many viewers, this roiling boil of incoherence could be too much, especially considering that Anderson is as interested in tidy plot mechanics as Pynchon is, which is to say, not at all. At a certain point, Doc virtually abandons the kidnapped millionaire case he's spent the previous ninety minutes stumbling through, in a move that is de rigueur for postmodern fiction but has the potential to strike some viewers as too cute at best and irresponsible at worst. All the criticisms are valid, I'll allow. Yet for some people (this one included), Inherent Vice maintains such a hypnotic, overwhelming pull that the murk becomes the message. There's something so seductive about Anderson's slow, drifting images - you feel like you can sink around in them for a while - and the absence of plot importance means that the film's enveloping tendrils never contract. It hangs around in the subconscious, a cinematic loop that's high on Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler and ZAZ and the Coen Brothers and Robert Downey Sr. and never seems anything less than 100% Anderson and Pynchon. Plus, in his steadfast refusal to pander to convention, Anderson ultimately turns Inherent Vice into a subversive political manifesto. When Doc gets fed up with society's hurlyburly, he bows out to focus on those people he loves, no matter how damaged or diseased they seem (and that goes double for Brolin's hippy-hating "Renaissance Detective," who lashes out violently against everything Doc stands for but can't live without him). At the end of the day, the drugs haven't made Doc stupid - they've made him sweet. The movie's the same way.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown writes that the film "doesn't wrap up neatly, or much at all, and any hope that it will should be abandoned long before tailing Doc to his first interview, much less his last. If that doesn't sit well with you, might as well find another movie to fill your Friday night slot. The story sprawls and sprawls, outward and beyond, and never contracts, to the point that what already feels free-wheeling and out of control begins to feel more so. It isn't Anderson's failing, though, or even Pynchon's. It isn't a missed opportunity at all. Like his previous films, Anderson is at his best when things threaten to slip through his fingers, and it's in his dealings with chaos, ambiguity and the madcap mundane that Inherent Vice comes together in ways all but ordained. It couldn't wrap up in any other fashion without betraying everything Anderson and Pynchon are driving at. The more Doc pursues the truth, the larger and more complex his case becomes. Pynchon's PI shoulders the burden of the entire hippie movement; dabbling in ideals and passions, rebelling in a haze of smoke, free love and rock-n-roll, and realizing - often much too late - that those in power mean to stay in power, that corruption is a means and an end for the sober, and that resistance is a dying man's game. There are moments when style dominates substance - not entirely uncharacteristic of Anderson, though usually not to this degree - and others when it seems Anderson isn't concerned with making a coherent movie as much as he is capturing Pynchon's affection for unfilmable incoherence (reports from the set and interviews with cast members, while positive in nature, confirm as much). Patience is required, multiple viewings are a must, and a certain level of trust in the director goes a long way. Inherent Vice isn't an easy film to fall for, much less enjoy, and offers nothing but postmodernistic frustration to anyone who isn't paying close attention at all times. And even if you follow everything, even if you 'get it' right away or eventually, you won't necessarily like it. Anderson isn't gunning for your approval. He's working to evoke and provoke, and maybe, maybe do something more. If, that is, you're dogged enough to unravel the mystery beneath the mystery; the one that ties Inherent Vice to Pynchon than anything else."
From Paramount Home Entertainment comes another recent crime drama, Rupert Wyatt's The Gambler. If audiences criticized Inherent Vice for being too dense, then The Gambler got a bad rap for not being dense enough. In adapting Karel Reisz and James Toback's underrated 1974 character study of the same name (with its essential James Caan performance), Wyatt and Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Monahan have streamlined many of the original film's psychological knots. Reisz and Toback were more interested in watching Caan's Axel Freed get off on his own destruction; Wyatt and Monahan have reconceived the character (now Mark Wahlberg's Jim Bennett) as a self-loathing rich kid who pisses away his family's money because he doesn't think he - or his acerbic mother (Jessica Lange, in a role that is easily within her wheelhouse but is no less entertaining for it) - deserves any of the status that comes from it. To paraphrase Holden Caulfield, Jim thinks they're all a bunch of phonies, and the film contents itself with how Jim's efforts to jettison his privilege put him in congress with some very dangerous loan sharks (Alvin Ing, Michael K. Williams, and a fearsome John Goodman, who would have gotten a Best Supporting Actor nomination had he had one more scene). That's about it, and the film's detractors are 100% correct when they say that the Reisz/Toback version is more nuanced. The appeal here is watching Wahlberg and Co. trade some choice Bill Monahan barbs with one another (Monahan wrote The Departed, and this movie shares much of that earlier film's linguistic flair), not mapping the psyche of a tortured mind. However, as modest as its ambitions may be, The Gambler scores on pure entertainment value alone. Were it 1946, the film would be a B-movie delight starring someone like John Garfield or Van Heflin, and critics like Manny Farber would be praising its low-stakes charms. Wyatt's direction is flashy but not ostensibly so (think Scorsese-lite), and he galvanizes scenes as disparate from one another as Bennett's first grand-scale losing streak and his bitter tirades against his undergraduate English class. Still, Wyatt is working with a Lexus of a script, and what's characteristically great about Monahan's work is his mixture of the sacred and the profane (English lit. with f-bombs) and his way of allowing stock characters to reveal unexpected, delightful complexities (Williams' criminal wants to start an avocado farm, for example, and Goodman plays the kind of devil that knows he's bad news and really hopes you're smart enough to not test him on that point). However, the real standout is Wahlberg, who gives one of his best performances here (it's right up there with his turn as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights and Tommy Corn in I Heart Huckabees). While his much-touted weight loss isn't that impressive (Wahlberg was jacked before the shoot from Lone Survivor and Pain & Gain, so at sixty pounds lighter he doesn't look emaciated but merely normal), the intelligence is. This is the first character Wahlberg has ever played where you can see him constantly thinking, constantly trying to figure all the angles on the way to self-destruction, and that mental acuity transfers over to his classroom lecture scenes: never has Wahlberg seemed so comfortable playing a full-fledged intellectual (those still coping with PTSD after his work as a gape-mouthed science teacher in The Happening - you may relax). Furthermore, he's such a generous performer. You can sense he'd rather you linger on Goodman or even costar Domenick Lombardozzi than hog the spotlight, and that spirit means we care about the borderline tangential subplots concerning two of his students (college-basketball star Anthony Kelley and a very winning Brie Larson) because Wahlberg values them so much. He's the centerpiece of this small but satisfying picture. Hollywood rarely makes these kinds of films anymore, mid-range adult programmers that, like Killing Them Softly or Pain and Gain, aren't afraid to blend mild socio-economic resonance with populist flair.
Martine Liebman took a different approach, writing that the film "loses its edge...For as well as it's crafted to begin - with Wahlberg selling the intensity, the unbreakable addiction - there's never much real sense of deep characterization. Sure he's an accomplished lecturer and one of the most refreshingly blunt ones at that, but the entire movie centers on his gambling. Even with a few flashbacks to his childhood - driving with his dad, holding his breath in the pool - he's an empty vessel who thrives on the addiction and nothing else. Nothing - not his classroom antics, not his burgeoning relationship with one of his students - helps to give shape to a shallow character who isn't in the least bit sympathetic because, outside of that brilliant open, turns into just another guy with just another problem that he's allowed to spiral deeply out of control. It's not Wahlberg's fault - he's quite good with the listless material at his disposal - but instead the painfully threadbare script that settles for simple rather than aims for amazing."
For the third big noir release of the week, we turn to something a little grungier: Shout Factory's new release of George Armitage's cult favorite Miami Blues. The great shame of Miami Blues is that it wasn't successful enough to kickstart a new screen detective franchise; working from Charles Willeford's 1984 novel, Armitage did yeoman's work in bringing Willeford's engagingly low-rent Miami cop Hoke Moseley to the big screen. As played by the great character actor Fred Ward, Moseley ranks near the very bottom of competent noir heroes. He's a bad husband and even worse father living in a cruddy transient hotel, and when he's not drinking so much that it impairs his day job, he's taking too much pride in his NFL-grade dentures (he's also way too young for dentures, natch). Somehow, though, this amalgam of pathetic signifiers still retains our total sympathies. No matter how much he'd rather drift through life's indignities, Moseley has a very low tolerance for injustice, and Ward is so perfect in the part it's a shame he would never get a role this good again. However, fans of Miami Blues know the reason why the picture didn't make Ward a star, and its name is Alec Baldwin. What Baldwin does with his Fred Frenger deserves comparison with Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death and Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. Baldwin is such a total sociopath that he takes childlike glee in committing the most transgressive criminal behaviors. Whether he's nonchalantly snapping a Hare Krishna's finger so suddenly that he gives the poor man a heart attack or beating Moseley to an inch of his life and then stealing his fake teeth and badge just for laughs, Frenger is some kind of criminal id that Baldwin embraces lustily. Long before Glengarry Glen Ross and 30 Rock confirmed it, Miami Blues let slip the fact that Baldwin is a brilliant character actor trapped in a leading man's body, and he so dominates Miami Blues that it's no surprise Ward didn't get more credit for the picture. If anything, Baldwin is too good. He's so disinterested in garnering our sympathies that Miami Blues threatens to turn into a glib collection of atrocities by the end (as Frenger dishes it out and as Armitage shoots it, the violence is sickeningly cartoony), though Armitage borrows just enough of producer Jonathan Demme's humanist style to keep the proceedings relatively light (the neon-pastel color scheme; a glorious pop soundtrack; an utterly winning Jennifer Jason Leigh as the dumb but sweet prostitute who falls for Frenger). Armitage would later perfect this kind of absurdist noir with the great Grosse Pointe Blank (and then screw up the formula with the dispiriting Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce), but Miami Blues maintains a funky, loosey-goosey vibe that's just as enchanting in its own right.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "writer-director George Armitage really wastes no time in bringing original novelist Charles Willeford's unique characters into the story, and in fact the film's breathless pace is one of its most appealing attributes...All three of the central performances in Miami Blues are first rate. Ward is excellent in a hangdog role, at times radiating a stunned disbelief that a character as dunderheaded as Junior could be causing so much trouble. Baldwin is feral and slimy as Junior, perfectly embodying a sociopathic narcissism. It's Leigh's Susie, though, who's the heart and soul of this film, and her gentle, sweet but ultimately smarter than she looks sensibility provide most of the film's emotional quotient. Miami Blues is a wonderfully outré outing that is at times a bit reminiscent of writers like Elmore Leonard, with outsized but still basically believable characters acting in sometimes outrageous ways. What's so interesting about the film is its kind of bizarre mashup of gonzo criminal scenes with an almost sweet love story. Almost being the operative word, since Susie's naivete proves to be her undoing - at least for a little while. It's fascinating that Junior's downfall begins with vinegar, for much like that additive Susie pours into a pie mix to test Junior's honesty, Miami Blues has a pungent tartness that's quite distinctive."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a Blu-ray upgrade of the 1973 crime classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle. A major inspiration on contemporary noir masters like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy (the former claimed it was The Friends of Eddie Coyle that made him transition from Westerns to crime-thrillers), George V. Higgins' novel eschews florid plot twists and snappy patter for indifferent realism and colloquial dialogue reflecting the hard, flat tones of Higgins' Massachusetts climes, tones that Yates and screenwriter Paul Monash have expertly preserved. Best known at the time for the iconic 1968 policier Bullitt, Yates doesn't deliver any of the chases or action that audiences might have expected (and preferred). Like the original novel, Yates's version is a brutal march to the grave, and the body is Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), a down-on-his-luck gunrunner who's desperate to rat on his criminal connections in order to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. That's as bleak and unsexy a noir setup as is humanly possible, and Yates gives (with the help of DP Victor Kemper) the proceedings a dull grey patina that only enhances the futility of Eddie's goal. So much of this movie unfolds in dingy cafes and banged-up cars and overcast days that work to present maybe the least flattering view of Boston that I've seen on-screen (anyone expecting the kinetic polish of Martin Scorsese's The Departed or Ben Affleck's The Town will be sorely disappointed), but the message is clear: this town is dead, and everyone in it is slowly catching up. How surprising, then, that The Friends of Eddie Coyle maintains a vise-grip on audiences despite its pervasive chill. Yates directs with unfussy precision - this is a deceptively crafted film, one where innocuous "diversions," like the Bruins game that Coyle and his duplicitous bartender Dillon (the blandly terrifying Peter Boyle) attend, have shattering consequences - and Monash's script gives the film's treasure-trove of character actors (Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Joe Santos, Alex Rocco, Mitchell Ryan, and James Tolkan) dialogue that's just the right side of stylized and dripping with Bahhstahn patois (the film's signature exchange: the nondescript, grimly hilarious manner in which Coyle describes how he got the nickname "Fingers"). Ultimately, we can't look away because Mitchum is so good. By 1973, Mitchum was prone to slumming it in high-paying, disposable actioners (The Wrath of God and The Yakuza, anyone?), but he's a subtle marvel here, his natural charm buried under an impenetrable, hangdog misery. You can't blame Coyle for wanting to away from years of getting shorted by the state and his criminal confederates, even as it becomes clear the only way is down. One of the essential films of the 1970s.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that the film "is a very moody piece, but it sees the dark side of Boston like a well researched documentary would - without glamorizing and paying attention to all sorts of different details (even the accents are incredibly well done). Mitchum is perfectly cast as the aging gangster. He looks appropriately jaded, like a man who has finally realized that his best years are behind him, and vulnerable. On the inside he is still tough, but he no longer has the energy and desire to go against the system and exploit its weaknesses. Now all he wants is the boring but safe life he once rejected. From the moment he steps in front of the camera Mitchum literally becomes this man; he does not play the old-timer, he is the old-timer. The supporting cast is equally impressive. Peter Boyle plays the shady bartender Dillon and he also looks like a man who has spent the majority of his life pouring drinks and talking to dangerous people. Keats is cocky but careful, like a real small-time gun dealer who has done more deals than he can remember. And Foley is exactly the type of character James "Whitey" Bulger was probably talking to before he fled Boston in 1994."